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Business Mar 3, 2026 7 min read

Building in Public vs. Building in Stealth (I've Done Both)

Link11 was built in stealth for years. Lynk is being built in public from day one. The strategies are opposites—but both can win. Here's when to use each.

I've built two companies with completely opposite strategies.

Link11 was stealth mode for the first three years. No press. No public demos. No social media presence. We signed our first major clients before most people in the industry even knew we existed. We only went public when we had revenue, customers, and a defensible market position.

Lynk has been public from commit zero. Every feature ships with a blog post. Every technical decision gets documented. The roadmap is on GitHub. The pricing is transparent. I'm writing this before the product has even launched.

Both strategies worked. But for very different reasons. And in very different contexts.

Here's what I learned about when to build in stealth, when to build in public, and how to know which one you need.

Why We Built Link11 in Stealth

When we started Link11 in 2005, DDoS protection was a nascent market. The big players were telecom companies with expensive, clunky solutions. The attackers were getting more sophisticated. The gap was obvious — but so was the execution risk.

We chose stealth for three reasons:

1. The technology wasn't ready for public scrutiny

Our core IP was a custom mitigation algorithm that could distinguish legitimate traffic from attack traffic in real-time. This was hard. Really hard. It took 18 months of R&D before we had something that worked reliably at scale.

If we'd gone public early, we would have been selling vaporware. Or worse — overpromising and underdelivering. In cybersecurity, your reputation is everything. One public failure and you're done. We couldn't afford to be "that startup that promised the moon and couldn't deliver."

Stealth gave us time to get it right before making claims.

2. We were selling to enterprises who value proof over hype

Our target customers were banks, telecom providers, and government agencies. These organizations don't buy based on TechCrunch articles or Twitter buzz. They buy based on references, certifications, and proof of reliability.

A flashy launch would have been noise. What they wanted was:

We spent three years building that foundation quietly. By the time we went public, we had Fortune 500 logos, 99.99% uptime, and airtight compliance. The enterprise buyers didn't care that they'd never heard of us before. They cared that we could prove we worked.

3. We didn't want to tip off competitors

DDoS mitigation was becoming a hot market. Akamai, Cloudflare, and Arbor Networks were all expanding into it. If we'd announced our approach publicly, one of them could have replicated our core insight in 6-12 months and outspent us on execution.

Stealth bought us a lead time advantage. By the time competitors understood what we were doing, we had customer lock-in, operational moats (proprietary traffic data), and a brand reputation that couldn't be copied overnight.

In a winner-take-most market with deep-pocketed incumbents, stealth was a survival strategy.

Why I'm Building Lynk in Public

Lynk is the opposite playbook. Everything is public:

Why?

1. The market rewards speed and feedback loops

Lynk is entering a fast-moving AI infrastructure space. The technology landscape shifts every 3-6 months. GPT-5 could drop tomorrow and change everything. New model providers, new frameworks, new paradigms — all happening in public, in real-time.

In this environment, the faster you learn, the faster you win. Stealth mode would slow us down. Every week spent in isolation is a week without user feedback, market validation, or course corrections.

Building in public creates forcing functions:

This is the opposite of Link11, where we could afford 18 months of R&D in a cave. Lynk needs to iterate in weeks, not years.

2. Distribution is the moat, not the algorithm

Link11's moat was proprietary technology. Nobody else had our mitigation algorithms. That IP was worth protecting.

Lynk's moat is different. The core technology — LLM routing, prompt optimization, cost reduction — isn't defensible IP. OpenRouter, LiteLLM, and others are solving similar problems. The tech will commoditize.

What won't commoditize: trust, community, and distribution.

Building in public is a distribution strategy. Every blog post is:

In a commoditized market, the company with the biggest audience wins. Stealth mode would be leaving leverage on the table.

3. The playbook is well-known — execution is what matters

In 2005, nobody knew how to build cloud-native DDoS protection. The "how" was the secret sauce.

In 2026, everyone knows how to build an AI inference router. The architecture patterns are public. The frameworks are open source. The cloud infrastructure is a commodity.

Sharing our approach doesn't give competitors an advantage. They already know the playbook. What they don't have is:

Competitors can copy features. They can't copy momentum and community. Those are earned, not built.

The Tradeoffs (Because There Always Are)

Neither strategy is strictly better. Both have costs.

Stealth mode tradeoffs:

Building in public tradeoffs:

The key is knowing which tradeoffs you can afford — and which ones you can't.

When to Build in Stealth

Choose stealth if:

1. Your competitive advantage is a secret

If your core IP is a novel algorithm, a unique dataset, or a breakthrough technology that competitors don't know about — protect it. Going public too early gives away the game.

Examples: DeepMind (pre-Google acquisition), SpaceX's Starship development, pharmaceutical R&D.

2. You're in a slow-moving, high-trust market

If your customers are enterprises who evaluate based on references and compliance, not hype — stealth makes sense. Use the quiet time to build proof points that matter: revenue, uptime, certifications, customer logos.

Examples: cybersecurity, healthcare IT, financial infrastructure, defense tech.

3. First-mover advantage is structural

If being first creates durable moats (network effects, data flywheels, regulatory capture) — then speed-to-market matters more than speed-to-feedback. Stealth lets you move faster without tipping off competitors.

Examples: Uber (geographic expansion), Airbnb (supply-side bootstrapping), Stripe (payment infrastructure).

4. You need deep R&D time

If your product requires years of research before it's viable — you can't "build in public" because there's nothing to show yet. Use stealth to buy uninterrupted focus time.

Examples: biotech, aerospace, quantum computing, nuclear fusion.

When to Build in Public

Choose public if:

1. Distribution is your moat

If the technology is commoditized but audience/community is the differentiator — build in public. Every post, every update, every piece of transparency is a distribution asset.

Examples: developer tools, SaaS platforms, content businesses, API-first products.

2. Feedback loops >> secrecy

If iterating fast matters more than protecting IP — go public. Real user feedback beats internal assumptions every time.

Examples: consumer apps, horizontal SaaS, marketplace products, anything with strong network effects.

3. The playbook is known, execution is the game

If competitors already know what to build (open source references, established patterns) — there's no advantage in secrecy. Focus on out-executing them publicly.

Examples: Vercel (everyone knows how to deploy web apps), Supabase (Firebase clone, openly), Fly.io (Heroku-like PaaS).

4. Trust and transparency are market differentiators

If your industry is full of black-box, opaque incumbents — transparency becomes a weapon. Showing your work builds trust faster than any sales pitch.

Examples: open-source SaaS, indie developer tools, ethical AI, privacy-focused products.

The Hybrid Approach

Here's the nuance: you don't have to pick one forever.

Many successful companies start in stealth, build the core product, and then go public with a bang:

The pattern: stealth to build the foundation, public to accelerate growth.

Others do the reverse — start loud, then go quiet to focus:

The pattern: public to build buzz, stealth to execute.

The key is intentionality. Know why you're in the mode you're in. And know when to switch.

What I'd Do Differently

Looking back at Link11, I don't regret stealth. It was the right call for that market, that time, that product.

But here's what I underestimated: the cost of having no early audience.

When we finally went public, we had to build distribution from scratch. No email list. No blog readers. No community. We were selling into a cold market. Sales cycles were 6-12 months because nobody had heard of us.

If I could do it again, I'd run a hybrid strategy:

This would have let us build an audience without revealing our hand. By launch day, we'd have had an email list of 5,000 CISOs who already trusted our insights. The go-to-market would have been 10x easier.

That's what I'm doing with Lynk. Building the product and the audience in parallel. Not just because it's 2026 and that's the meta — but because distribution compounds, and you can't start too early.

The Bottom Line

Stealth vs. public isn't a moral choice. It's a strategic one.

Go stealth if:

Go public if:

And remember: you can switch. Stealth to build the product, public to scale distribution. Or public to build buzz, stealth to nail execution.

What matters isn't the strategy. It's knowing why you're using it — and when to change.

I built Link11 in stealth because the market demanded it. I'm building Lynk in public because the market rewards it. Both can work. Both have worked.

The question isn't which is better. It's which fits your market, your product, and your timeline.

Choose accordingly. Execute relentlessly. Everything else is noise.

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